The Comfortable, Elegant Chastity Belt For the Modern Rape Victim

The Comfortable, Elegant Chastity Belt For the Modern Rape Victim

Hey, ladies. Quick market research poll: What’s stopping you from strapping on that old chastity belt? Do its iron breeches chafe your thighs? Is its bulky vagina plate disrupting your panty line? Or have you simply become tired of hounding your patriarch for the key when nature calls? Enter AR Wear, a cute new line of gleaming boy shorts that look like American Apparel attire but feature cut-resistant fabrics, a “reinforced skeletal structure” around the vaginal area, and convenient locks around the thighs and waist designed to empower you to “feel safer” when walking, running, dating, clubbing, traveling, even sleeping. The “AR” stands for “ARe you kidding?”—no, sorry. It’s “Anti-Rape.”

AR Wear is for you, the woman who’s “ever been out walking alone, wishing you could feel safer.” But it’s also for that other “you—parents and friends,” who have spent nights “worried about a loved one” walking alone. AR wear will give you, “women and girls, additional power to control” your bodies “when things go wrong.” But they’ll also give you, parents and friends, a pointed yet elegant holiday gift for the women in your lives whose bodies need safety locks.

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“Rape is about as wrong as it gets,” the two New York women behind AR Wear note in their Indiegogo campaign, which has raised a little more than half of its $50,000 goal for finalizing production-ready prototypes of the design. “The only one responsible for a rape is the rapist and AR Wear will not solve the fundamental problem that rape exists in our world. Only by raising awareness and education, as well as bringing rapists to justice, can we all hope to eventually accomplish the goal of eliminating rape as a threat to both women and men. Meanwhile, as long as sexual predators continue to populate our world, AR Wear would like to provide products to women and girls that will offer better protection against some attempted rapes while the work of changing society's rape culture moves forward.”

While we’re working on that whole rape culture thing, AR Wear will help women move freely about the world with the confidence that only a reinforced skeletal structure around her vagina can provide. After all, nothing makes a woman feel comfortable in her own body like a constant physical reminder that she's expected to guard her genitals against potential sexual assaults at all times. Then again, it beats explaining to mom, dad, and the local public defender why you failed to strap on your rape-deflecting bootie shorts when you fell asleep at a friend's house and "things went wrong."

Amanda Hess is a David Carr fellow at the New York Times. Follow her on Twitter.